


neither one nor the other

by puertoricansuperman



Category: War of the Worlds (2005 Spielberg)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Father-Daughter Relationship, Future Fic, Gen, I will fill this tag with wholesome content if it kills me, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-10-20 09:05:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17619503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puertoricansuperman/pseuds/puertoricansuperman
Summary: It's been seven years since the invasion. Seven years since the end of the world. Now Rachel’s worst nightmare is right in front of her, threatening to stop her heart. A tripod has come back to life.Or: A War of the Worlds '05 sequel fic by way ofBumblebeeandThe Iron Giant.





	1. Wednesday Night

**Author's Note:**

> *aggressively strumming guitar* I WILL FILL THIS TAG WITH WHOLESOME CONTENT IF IT KILLS ME

_"But how can we escape?" he asked, suddenly. "They are invulnerable, they are pitiless."_

_"Neither the one nor, perhaps, the other," I answered. "And the mightier they are the more sane and wary should we be."_

— _The War of the Worlds_ by H.G. Wells

* * *

For Rachel Ferrier, the invasion began with her father yelling.

_“Manny, listen to me. Get in the car.”_

This is is how the memory coalesces in her mind: she is sitting in the backseat of a car, with her sky-blue overnight suitcase fallen on the floor at her feet. Her older brother sits in the front seat with a cardboard box on his lap. Her father is talking to a stranger through the passenger-side door.

_“I don’t have time to explain.”_

Rachel remembers most of that day. She remembers crouching under a table during the lightning storm, watching the power go out. She remembers standing by the screen door and staring at a bright, cloudy sky until she saw her father come back. But those events are different. They belong to the time before—before the sky broke open, before the ground shook, before buildings exploded and people started dying. For Rachel Ferrier, the end of the world began with her father breaking down yelling.

_"Get in, Manny, or you're gonna die!"_

Her father is yelling now. And even seven years later, with the invasion a long, long time in the past, Rachel can’t stand the sound of it. It’s like treading water or feeling the ground shake or hearing a branch scrape against the window. It’s a horrible sensation that runs a very real risk of sending Rachel into a panic attack. So she runs away from it. She runs out of the house, to the workbench set up under the oak tree in the backyard, and she gets to work prying apart a fractured metal panel from the leg of a dead tripod. The metal is bizarre and unearthly—highly conductive, yet nonmagnetic; strangely adherent, yet perpetually shiny. The panels are held together by sets of intricate alien wiring. Once upon a time they slid in and out and swiveled at will, part of the outer shell of an alien fighting machine. Nowadays Rachel uses the panels as homebrew heat shields. Prying them apart takes both her hands and most of her attention. It makes a good distraction from the sound of her parents yelling inside the house.

_They’ve been yelling at each other since I was born,_ Rachel thinks, with no small amount of bitterness. Mary Ann and Ray, the match made in purgatory. They had a few years of peace after the divorce—and a few months of it after the invasion. But it’s been seven years since the invasion. Ray and Mary Ann have been living under the same roof, at Rachel’s grandmother’s house in Boston, for seven years. They might as well be married again.

Rachel doesn’t notice that the yelling has faded out until the screen door at the back of the house slams shut. She looks up and sees her father standing on the back porch, hands stuffed in his pockets.

“Hey, Rach.”

All these years and he still calls her that. Like she’s still ten years old. Rachel rolls her eyes and goes back to the paneling.

Ray makes his way down the stairs and up to the workbench. He leans up against the table with careful, practiced ease. “Look, Rach,” he says. “Your mom and me—”

“Were you talking about Robbie?”

Ray pauses, staring at Rachel with his mouth half-open. He looks away after a few seconds, but he’s tipped his hand. Rachel grabs a flathead screwdriver and starts to wedge it between the panels.

“You’re never going to convince her,” she says.

“Rachel—”

“You’re just picking a fight every time you bring it up.”

Ray sighs and shakes his head. Rachel digs the screwdriver in deeper between the two panels, shattering the delicate wiring between them. Still the panels won’t budge. _Maybe I need more leverage,_ she thinks, and lets up a little. She’s got time. She has a design in mind for the panels, as heat shields on an engine, but they don’t have an engine yet.

“When’s the next convoy?” Rachel says.

“Just talked to one,” Ray says. “I’m not picking a fight.”

“So, not for a few months. And you know she doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“ _She_ brought it up to _me_ ,” Ray says, the issue of army convoys forgotten. “If she didn’t want to talk about it—”

“She’s grieving, Ray!”

Rachel doesn’t call her father by his first name. Not to his face. So Ray stares at her, mouth half-open in mid-sentence. Rachel stabs her screwdriver into metal circuitry so she doesn’t drive it into something else, and stares at him.

“She wants to talk about Robbie as he _was_ ,” she says. “He—he’s not here anymore. No matter how much you want him to be. You can’t keep bringing him up and _acting_ like he’s still here and—and expect—”

The metal panels give way all at once. The screwdriver slices through them like a hot knife through butter and disparate pieces of circuitry fly in every direction. Rachel’s arm hits the table hard enough to bruise. Metal clatters onto the ground.

“ _Fuck!_ ”

They stand in silence. Rachel nurses her aching wrist. Ray sighs quietly and bends down to pick up the fallen panel.

“You got any more of these?” He deposits the panel back on the worktable. It’s a little dented from the impact of the screwdriver.

“More than enough.” Rachel takes the panels, stacks them together, and sets them aside with the rest of the scraps in the baskets under the table. She and Ray have a lot of pieces here—solar panels, batteries, power cords, bits of alien metal—but until they find something to fix, an engine or a generator or an electric light, all of it is worthless. “I just don’t have anything to staple them _to_.”

“Yeah.” Ray folds his arms. He’s still leaning against the worktable, looking halfway-over his shoulder at Rachel. “What do you think? An engine?”

“Sure,” Rachel says. “Sure. You have an engine lying around? What, is it hidden in the garage?”

It’s an old joke they have, a way to cope with material shortages and lost resources after the invasion. _What do you think you’re gonna find in the garage? A car?_ No one really finds it funny anymore. Ray cracks a smile anyway.

“I know where we can find one.”

“What?”

Ray doesn’t answer. He steps away from the workbench, still smiling, and starts to away. He’s heading for the padlocked gate in the fence, to leave without going through the house.

“Are you serious? Dad!”

Ray turns around with one hand on the gate, still grinning like an idiot. “I know where we can find one,” he says, again. “Give me some time to work it out. I’ll get back to you.” He unlatches the gate and steps through. The fence is high enough that it hides him completely once he closes the gate behind him.

“Dad, wait—”

“I’ll get back to you!”

_He’s not coming back,_ Rachel thinks. Not for the rest of the day, at least—not until he’s worked out whatever mysterious plan he has. Ray lives with the rest of the family in Grandma Sylvia’s house, but he spends a lot of time out in the city, picking up odd jobs and talking to people. It’s easier that way, if Ray and Mary Ann don’t have to share the same space for too long. And Ray talks to people—he’s always been good at talking to people—so he knows a lot about what’s going on outside Boston, what the rest of the world is up to. He knows more than anyone else in the family. If anyone can rustle up a secondhand engine out of nowhere, he can.  
Rachel goes and locks the gate. 

* * *

Rachel’s prediction is correct—by dinnertime her father is still nowhere to be seen. The family gathers around the dining room table—Rachel and Mary Ann and Caroline, Rachel's half-sister, and Grandma Sylvia. Ever since Grandpa Clay passed away a few years back, Grandma Sylvia always leaves an empty seat next to her. Rachel’s stepdad Tim is often the only man at the table, since Ray is usually out of the house when dinnertime rolls around. More than once Rachel has heard him sneaking back in in the middle of the night, rummaging around in the pantry for leftovers. It would be kind of sad if it wasn't a totally self-inflicted problem.

“We had a good day at the hospital today,” Tim says, while everyone digs into their potato soup. “That army caravan came through. They gave us seventy-five gallons of gas for our old computer units.”

“CPUs,” Rachel says.

“Yeah, those. We never use them now that all the records are on paper. And now we have enough gas to keep things running next time the power goes out.”

“That's great,” Mary Ann says.

“We planted cucumbers today!” Caroline says. She's seven years old and just learning the art of dominating the conversation. “Mom got cucumber seeds from the neighbors and Grandma showed us how to plant ’em.”

“Wow,” Rachel says. “You’ll have to show me sometime.”

“It's super fun,” Caroline says, “and we got to add ’em to the garden, cause it didn't have cucumbers before! I've never had cucumbers before either.”

“Yes you have,” Tim says, smiling. “You were just too little to remember.”

In that moment Rachel realizes how long it's been since she’s eaten a cucumber. It's been years. The only fruits and vegetables they eat now are the fruits and vegetables that Mary Ann and Sylvia can grow in their garden—lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, and strawberries, mostly. And now cucumbers. Rachel hasn't eaten an orange in six years. She hasn't eaten an avocado since before the invasion. She used to love avocados as a kid. Now she can barely remember what they taste like.

“Rachel?”

She blinks. Her mom is staring across the table at her, smiling softly. “What did you do today?”

“Nothing.” She picks at her soup. They're always having soup.

“You were out in the yard for a while,” Mary Ann says.

“Yeah.”

“Were you working on one of your projects?”

“Mm-hmm.” Rachel doesn’t offer any more answers. An uncomfortable silence stretches across the table. Spoons click back and forth against old-fashioned porcelain. Rachel has distant memories of staring at these dishes through the glass doors of her grandmother’s china hutch.

“Are you feeling okay?” Mary Ann says.

“Do you remember—” Rachel looks up from her bowl. She isn't sure what she's trying to say. She can’t quite put words to the feelings rattling around in her mind. She remembers so much from before the invasion—television, grocery stores, schools, 4-H, ice cream, takeout—all the things nobody talks about anymore. “I—I used to do 4-H. I had a horse named Puzzle Piece.”

“A horse? Really?” Caroline says, wide eyed.

“I do remember that,” Mary Ann says. She smiles. “You used to love riding.”

“I didn't want to stop,” Rachel says. Something is bubbling inside her, roaring toward the surface, but hell if she can identify it. “I didn’t ever want to stop. I didn't want to be a mechanic. I never even thought about cars.”

No one seems to know what to say to that. Rachel regrets the words almost as soon as they're out of her mouth. No one is going to understand. Even she doesn't really know what she's saying, what she's trying to express.

“I—I'm sorry.” She pushes her chair back, stands up from the table. “I just need some time to myself. The—the soup is great, Grandma.”

“Rachel,” her mother says, but Rachel keeps moving, through the kitchen, toward the stairs. “Rachel, wait. You've been alone all day.”

“I'm not hungry,” Rachel says. That used to be a get-out-of-dinner free card, back when they couldn't afford to waste any food. Then Caroline learned how to say it and ruined it for everyone else. “Really, Mom, I just—”

The front door slams open. Everyone in the room jumps.

“Rachel!”

Ray skids into the dining room. “Rachel—there you are. Get packed, we gotta go.”

“What’s going on?” Mary Ann stands up. She’s ready to flee Boston at a moment’s notice—everyone is.

“Nothing. Nothing bad!” Ray says. “We’re going on a road trip.”

“A _road trip?”_ Mary Ann says.

“Really?” Rachel says.

“Yes, really,” Ray says. He’s out of breath. “There’s an army convoy heading south. To Providence. There’s room for us to hitch a ride but they’re leaving _now_. We have to go.”

“You can’t just leave,” Mary Ann says. Ray gives her one of his trademark grins.

“Why not?”

And just like that they're arguing again. Rachel stands in the doorway of the dining room, frozen out of habit. It's never a good idea to get between her parents in a fight. But Ray keeps looking at her, expectant, hopeful, in between his jabs at Mary Ann.

_Providence._ Rachel has never been there. She's never been much of anywhere. She's lived in Boston the last several years and Jersey City the years before that. She remembers visiting her dad in Bayonne, and going to Arizona with her parents when she was five years old—but that was before the invasion. _Before the invasion._ Everything happened before the invasion.

“She's my daughter too, Ray!”

“You think I don’t know that?”

Ray and Mary Ann are winding up for another shouting match. Rachel has to fight the urge to clap her hands over her ears, to run away and pretend it isn't happening. “Dad,” she says. Ray doesn't hear. “Dad!”

The fight stops. Both of Rachel’s parents turn to look at her in silence. Rachel stares back. Her choice is obvious. For a second she doubts herself, doubts what she’s about to say—but she can’t. She can’t stay here and pretend that things have always been this way.

“How long do we have?”

Ray grins. Mary Ann’s face falls and Rachel almost regrets it, almost, but she can’t take the words back. She doesn’t want to.

“Five minutes.”

Rachel turns and runs through the kitchen, up the stairs and into her room. The argument resumes behind her, but she doesn’t care anymore. She’s far away from it now. It takes two minutes to throw an extra change of clothes and a crochet needle into her go-bag. Then she’s flying down the stairs again, hugging Caroline and Grandma Sylvia and her mom, and running out the front door after her father.

* * *

_Wednesday, June 27  
_ _6:34 pm_

Rachel and her dad run three streets over just in time to catch the army convoy rolling down Massachusetts Avenue. It’s one of the smaller groups Rachel has seen, clearly meant for trade rather than fighting—a few armored trucks with open-air beds, carrying crates of scrap metal and spare parts and food. Ray runs up alongside them and flags down one of the officers, and before Rachel has time to worry they’re being pulled up into the back of a truck. “You’re cutting it close,” the officer says, and leaves them alone after that.

“What’s he talking about?” Rachel says.

“I signed on as their mechanic,” Ray says. “All the way to Providence, and then I sign on again or they leave me there. If we hadn’t made the convoy…” He shrugs, tilts his head back and forth, but the message is clear: breaking a contract with the military, even an unwritten one, has consequences.

“If I hadn’t wanted to go,” Rachel says, slowly. “Would you have gone alone?”

“I knew you’d want to come,” Ray says, and smiles. Rachel rolls her eyes.

_Wednesday, June 27_  
_7:41 pm_

Curled up against the side of the truck bed, there's not a lot for Rachel to do on the way to Providence. She listens to the conversations around her—disinterested soldiers, mostly—and works on her crocheting. She's making a pair of hand warmers, a birthday present for Caroline.

“How long does it take to get to Providence?” she asks her dad.

“Three hours,” he says. “Give or take.”

_Wednesday, June 27_  
_8:15 pm_

“Mechanic!”

The shout jolts Rachel out of her half-sleepy state. She sits up—feels her father run a soothing hand through her hair. Then she hears the silence where the rumbling of the engines used to be. The sky is almost dark.

“What is it?” she says.

“Don't know.” Rays moves away from here, toward the edge of the truck bed. “I'll be right back.” He drops out of view.

Rachel waits up for him, counting the minutes until he gets back. She hears a muffled conversation—loud, irritated words. The other soldiers in the truck are dead silent, dead still. The wall of the truck bed presses into Rachel’s back. She waits.

_Wednesday, June 27_  
_8:43 pm_

Fear is a constant torment that eats away at Rachel’s stomach and closes the night sky around her like a cage, but eventually her dad clambers back up into the truck bed. The convoy starts moving again.

“What happened?” Rachel says.

“Coolant problem. Engine overheated.” Ray has the voice of a man who has given this explanation too many times in the last thirty minutes. He curls up with his arm around Rachel, and shuts his eyes. He stays like that for the rest of the night. Rachel stays awake a little longer.

_Wednesday, June 27_  
_9:58 pm_

Rachel is weaving the same crochet line over and over in her dreams when she feels someone shaking her shoulder. She opens her eyes into the glow of an electric lantern. Ray has his hand on her shoulder.

“We're here, Rach.”

Providence doesn't look like Rachel thought it would. It doesn't look like much of anything, shrouded in darkness beyond the trucks’ yellow headlights. Rachel climbs out of the truck, hears glass and gravel crunch under her shoes as she lands on the ground.

The convoy is parked just outside a building. As the soldiers disembark, and officers discuss posting a watch, a door opens and an old man steps out.

“Army?” he says, louder than Rachel would’ve anticipated. One of the officers goes over to talk to him.

The soldiers unload a truly impressive amount of food—mostly canned goods, some homemade. A couple more adults appear from the building to inspect it and bring it inside. The soldiers watch from a respectful distance. They’ve done all this many times before. When at least half the food has been unloaded the old man makes some permissive gesture, and the soldiers start to move into the building in twos and threes.

_Wednesday, June 27_  
_10:11 pm_

From the inside the building looks like it might have once been a hotel. The wine-red carpet is worn thin. A fire roars in a fireplace set in the right-hand wall, lighting most of the room. The carpet is strewn with blankets and bedrolls and padded furniture serving as makeshift beds. A tiled path leads to the back of the building, staircases and defunct elevators.

There are families here—men and women and children who watch the soldiers with guarded curiosity. There aren't many of them, but Rachel can feel their eyes on her as she walks.

“You have the run of the second floor,” an officer announces, when they reach one of the back staircases. “If you plan to stay on the first floor or leave the building, inform an officer and respect what the residents tell you. This is their territory.”

The soldiers disperse. Most of them head up the stairs. Ray lingers at the edge of the stairwell.

“What do you say, Rachel?”

“I want to stay near the doors,” Rachel says. Ray doesn't look surprised. He says something to one of the officers, then to one of the civilians, and then he guides Rachel around behind the counter in the lobby.

“Is this okay?” he says.

Rachel nods.

“Not too tight?”

“It's fine.”

“Tomorrow we can go out and get our engine,” Ray says, as they settle down to sleep. “It's nothing but scrap out here. You can find anything.”

_That's not a good thing,_ Rachel thinks, but she's too tired to argue about it. She nestles against her dad’s shoulder. She falls asleep there.

_Thursday, June 28_  
_1:19 am_

Rachel is floating through dim twilight. She isn’t awake, but she hears soft voices talking over her head.

“We’re going on to old New York. We’ll be there for a week,” a voice is saying. “We can always use a mechanic.”

“Thank you.” That’s Ray’s voice, soft and restrained. “But I can’t. My daughter is here. New York is…” He pauses. “I can’t take her there.”

“Shouldn’t have brought her here, either, then. Providence is a wasteland.”

“We'll be fine.”

Rachel is just drifting off again, wandering into the fog, when the voices start back up.

“Well, we should be back here in about two weeks. Can't speak for any vehicles passing through before then.”

“Thank you.” A pause. “If… if you hear something about my son, anything—there’s a man in Boston. Tim Wilson. He works at the hospital. If you can get the news to him—”

“I’ll do my best.” Another pause. “I’m sorry.”

It's all quiet after that.

* * *

In the dark, Providence is secretive and mysterious. In the light of day, it’s worse than Rachel ever could have imagined.

The hotel is the only standing building in sight. The street it stands on is lined with rubble. Here and there Rachel can see the outlines of houses. Cars. Intersections. There is enough wreckage here to form hills. With the army convoy gone there is not another human in sight.

“Dad,” Rachel says. They’ve ranged away from the hotel. Rachel keeps hoping they’ll see another building, or another person, or _something_. The further they get from the hotel, the emptier the city becomes. Rachel doesn’t know if Providence can even be called a city anymore. “Dad!”

Ray stops and turns back. His face is inscrutable. “What’s wrong?”

“I…” Rachel balks. The question is so straightforward it’s a little baffling. “What are we looking for?”

Ray shrugs. “Anything useful.” He smiles a little. Not a full smile. “Anything we can carry.”

Ray has a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Rachel has no idea where he got it, or when. She has her backpack, only big enough to carry bits of scrap and some basic tools. “I thought we were going to find an engine.”

“We are,” Ray says. “There’s got to be an engine around here somewhere.”

“But how—” Rachel gives up mid-sentence. They’ll figure something out. They always do. They’ll have to break down whatever they find to fix it, anyway. Might as well break it down here so they can carry the parts out.

They’re out of sight of the hotel, now. They might as well be the only two people on Earth. Heaps of wood and metal line the street. Dead trees dot the landscape here and there, reaching toward a grey sky. Things aren’t quite so terrible on this block. Cars sit in haphazard formations in the middle of the street, but as least they’re still recognizable as cars. Rachel sees a couple of buildings with all their windows blown out. It looks like scavengers have already been here—all the street signs are gone, and all of the cars have missing pieces. A few cars have been stripped down to bare frameworks.

“How far are we going to go?” Rachel says. They’re walking across an intersection littered with chunks of asphalt. “We have to make it back by sunset.”

“We’ve been walking for twenty minutes,” Ray says. “Calm down.”

“That's twenty minutes to get back,” Rachel grumbles. It'll be less if they run—which they might have to. Everyone knows that roving gangs of scavengers live out in the wilderness between cities. Rachel assumed they would be safe in Providence, but really the city is as good as wasteland already. They have no idea who else might be here.

Ray stops walking in the middle of the street. “Rachel.” She stops, too. For a second her heartbeat kicks up and fear floods her chest. Then she sees what Ray is staring at.

A tripod stands in the middle of the street ahead of them. It towers over everything else. It stands so straight, so still, even as Ray takes a trailing step toward it. Rachel doesn’t follow him. In her head she knows that the tripod is an empty shell, but she can’t bring herself to get any closer to it. There are dead tripods in Boston, of course. One of them, the one that collapsed into a building as it died, is quite close to Rachel’s house. But the Boston tripods have been torn apart, stripped down to skeletal frameworks by the military and various scavengers. The machine in front of Rachel is still in one piece. It might as well have died yesterday. It might as well still be alive.

“Rachel.” Her father is looking at her. “Rachel, it’s okay. It’s dead.”

“I know.” Rachel doesn’t budge. It’s so _tall_. The tripod stands with its legs planted firm in the asphalt, like it knew it would keel over if it tried to move. It’s a little weathered, maybe a little dingier than it was, but the metal is still so shiny.

“Rachel. Are you okay?”

“I want to go home.”

Ray takes a step toward her—away from the tripod. “It's okay, Rach.”

“I want to go home.” Rachel folds her arms over her chest. _Why did I come here?_ She isn't going to find what she needs. She never will.

“It's okay.” Ray is right next to her now. “They can't hurt you. They're dead.”

Rachel closes her eyes. She takes a deep, calming breath. “I know.”

“We can pull ’em apart,” Ray says. “You'd never find that many parts in Boston.”

“We can't reach any of it,” Rachel says, instead of what she's thinking: _I don't want to go anywhere near that thing._

“One of the other ones, then,” Ray says.

“Other ones?”

“They're all dead,” Ray says, like that's the problem.

“How many?” she says. He looks away. “Dad.”

“Three. That I've heard of. There might be more—outside the city.”

Rachel has no idea what to say to that. Her dad won't meet her eyes. He won't stop scanning the area around them like he senses danger. _Why am I here?_ she thinks again. This time she has an answer: she didn't want to stay in Boston. She wanted to _do_ something. She wanted to see what was left of the world. And she didn't want to keep pretending that everything was _normal_.

Well, the tripod in the street isn't normal. There's no pretending that away. Rachel lowers her arms and takes another deep breath.

“I'm sorry,” Ray says.

It's not something he says often. Rachel nearly does a double-take. Her dad smiles at her, not wholly sincere, but he's trying. He's trying. “I should've told you,” Ray says. “Before. Before we left. It's just—been a long time, so I thought—I mean—there are tripods in Boston.”

“I know.” Rachel nods. “It's okay.”

Ray looks a little surprised, but he nods. “You want to keep going?”

Rachel nods. They walk forward, up to the tripod and between its legs. The machine doesn't move once. 

* * *

The next tripod they see is kneeling in the street with one leg stretched out awkwardly behind it. Half of its metal hood is missing, leaving the cockpit exposed, and the extended leg is almost nothing but framework. _This_ tripod is dead.

The next one after that is slumped against a building, so the hood rests only a couple stories off the ground. It's missing a few pieces from around its legs, but as far as Rachel can tell the hood is in near-perfect condition—and, unlike the first tripod, close enough to the ground to be reached.

“I want to hit that one.” Rachel points at it.

“You’re sure?” her dad says.

“We can climb up the fire escape,” Rachel says. The path up to the hood of the tripod is all ladders and balconies set in the side of the building. It looks easy—Rachel is surprised the tripod isn’t missing more parts. “We might even be able to get inside.”

“And steal an engine.” Ray grins. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

Approaching the tripod is the hardest part. There are things Rachel doesn’t remember from the invasion—whole days that are nothing more than a blur in her memory. Seeing the tripod isn’t one of them. For the rest of her life, Rachel will remember the great silvery hood lowered before her, and the great glowing engine-eye lighting up her whole face. She’s sure her father remembers it, too. No one who’s seen a tripod up close ever really forgets.

Still, the ascent up the side of the building goes alright. Every time the tripod fills Rachel’s vision and her heart starts to seize up in her chest, she looks down. She sees her father following along just a few feet below her, and she feels better. She feels safe. She keeps climbing. There’s a third story balcony that almost overlaps with a ledge of shining metal, so close that Rachel can step across onto the hood of the tripod without even really having to jump. After that it’s easy to find a gap to climb in through. Here, Rachel pauses.

She's never seen the inside of a tripod. Not really, not up close. She remembers the tripod kneeling in front of her but she doesn't remember anything after that—only that her father tried to rescue her and they both almost died anyway. That's all Ray has ever been willing to say about it. He remembers.

“I'll stay out here,” he says, when he reaches the hood. “Keep watch.”

“Okay,” Rachel says, because she doesn't mind being alone if it's on her own terms, and this is. She's scavenged before and it's never ended badly. She can do this. She makes her descent through the gap.

The inside of the tripod is… quiet. Dark. Cramped. Rachel fits inside alright, but she doesn’t think her dad would. She doesn’t think she’d want him to. The space is tight enough as it is, tight enough that Rachel doesn’t have to imagine the walls closing in on her. She puts her arms out and touches a wall on either side. Well— _wall_ isn’t quite the right word. It’s a smooth, curving metal surface, soft and adherent under Rachel’s fingertips. _Alien metal._

Something lights up. Rachel gasps and looks at it—sees a panel on her left glowing a soft purplish-blue. She stares at it. The glows pulses in and out for few seconds—the light refracts into slow, starry waves—and then it flickers out. Rachel stands rooted to the floor.

She stays there, frozen, for a long time. She doesn't know what to do. _What was that? Was it—_ She keeps her eyes on the panel, but it doesn't move again. It doesn't flicker. The cockpit stays dark.

“Rach?” She startles at the noise, even as she recognizes her dad’s voice. “How's it going down there?”

“Fine!” Rachel starts moving again, searching for valuable tech as gingerly as she can. She winces a little every time she has to touch the metal panels, but the cockpit stays dark and silent. _Maybe it's nothing,_ she thinks. _Maybe it's just a power surge. Like phantom nerves._

She digs around underneath the various layers of armor inside the cockpit until she finds something useful—an intricately wired bundle of circuits and power cells, a sort of alien battery. Even one of these is enough to power a household for months, and a car for even longer. Rachel grins at it. _This. This is why we came._ Rachel stuffs it into her bag and starts to climb out of the cockpit. Her dad meets her halfway and helps her the rest of the way up.

“What d’you got?”

“Battery.”

Ray lets out a low whistle. “Let me see.”

Rachel digs the battery out and hands it over. Her dad turns it over and over in his hands, appraising it. “You see any more of these?”

“I don't know,” Rachel says. “It’s pretty dark in there. Maybe—” The ground shifts underneath their feet.

_Not the ground. The tripod._

Ray stares at her. “What was that?”

Rachel stares back. “Get down.”

They run for the edge of the balcony, one after the other. Rachel makes the jump first, lands square on the ledge. Her dad lands right behind her and spins, pushing her back, putting himself between her and the tripod. “Go! Go!”

For a second Rachel hesitates. For a second the tripod is still. _Maybe it's nothing,_ she thinks, desperately, and then the hood shifts again. It rises.

The surface of the hood lifts up. It rises above the balcony. The great circular eye of the tripod comes into view. Flickering pastel light washes over Rachel’s face. Terror floods her nerves. She feels her muscles lock up in fear.

It's been seven years since the invasion. Seven years since the end of the world. Now Rachel’s worst nightmare is right in front of her, threatening to stop her heart. A tripod has come back to life.


	2. Dead Providence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Added a Canon Divergence tag for, uh, semi-obvious reasons. The big two differences from movie canon are 1) Robbie never showed up in Boston, and at this point almost everyone assumes that he died during the invasion, and 2) no one ever really found out what was inside the tripods. They shut down, and everything that might have been inside rotted out, and now all that's left are the shells. And everyone is still wondering if another invasion could happen someday.

“Rachel, get down!”

Rachel doesn’t even have time to think. Her father grabs her arm and pulls her back, pulls her down, so they’re cowering against the wall at the back of the balcony. They can’t go any further than that. They’re trapped.

Rachel can’t breathe. She has never been so scared in her life. The tripod stands above them now, looking down. Its glowing eye casts flickering light over Rachel, over her father, over the entire building. Rachel can’t help it. She screams.

“Run,” her dad says. “Run!” He pushes her back again, toward a gap in the outer wall of the building. Rachel fumbles toward it. She can't take her eyes off the tripod. The thing is staring at her, she's sure, sizing her up before it vaporizes her or worse—before it lifts her up and steals her away—

The tripod stumbles back. It sort of rears its head back, so it isn't staring at Rachel anymore. It backs away. The movement is confusing—discordant. Rachel doesn't take the time to think it over. She slips through the gap in the wall. It brings her to a creaky floor on the inside of the building. Ray follows right behind her. They run together across a floor strewn with broken glass and splintered wood and ash.

“Get out,” Ray says. He’s breathing hard. He sounds like he’s choking. “Get out of here. Run.” They’re right next to a door. It’s crooked. Half-off its hinges. Rachel wrenches it open and practically flings herself through the opening, into a desolate stairwell. Ray scrambles after her. They’re only a couple of floors up. In minutes they’re on the ground floor—stumbling across barren, fractured linoleum. Rachel is halfway to the outer door when her father grabs her wrist and pulls her back. “Wait! Wait.”

Rachel freezes. Her dad pulls her back a little—away from the outer wall, around the corner. Behind cover. There Ray lets go of her arm, and leans out just a little to look through the gaps in the walls. Whatever he sees must be terrifying. He jerks back behind the wall and presses his back against it. He closes his eyes. “ _God_ ,” he whispers.

Rachel inches away from him and leans out for her own look. She can just see a long metal tentacle through a hole in the wall. The tripod is still, now. Rachel imagines its hood turning back and forth, looking for them, looking for a target—but she can’t see it. She has no idea.

“Not again,” Ray whispers. He lifts a trembling hand to his face. Then he sees Rachel watching him. “We have to go,” he said. He grabs her hand. “We have to go _now_.”

“Where?” They’re in the middle of nowhere. The closest group of people is in the hotel—what’s left of Providence. Even one tripod could wipe those people out in a heartbeat. The army is already long gone. There’s nothing else for miles in any direction.

“North.” Ray takes a deep breath. His hands are still shaking. “Boston, I think. I don’t know—” He stops himself, but he’s said enough. He’s tipped his hand. He has no idea what to do.

Before Rachel can say anything—before she has time to think—she hears brick and metal shattering. Ray flinches back against the wall. Rachel peers out again and sees the tripod’s legs stumbling back, bending and swiveling like it can’t keep its balance. Rachel has seen this before. She doesn’t know where, or when, but she has. “Dad. Look.”

Ray looks like he’s on the edge of a panic attack. He doesn’t move from where he stands against the wall. He doesn’t look out.

The tripod stumbles again. The building shakes around them. Glass shatters. Rachel flinches. Her dad grabs her hand and pulls her away from their hiding place, toward an empty doorway. The doorway faces north, or northeast—away from the tripod. A standing building between them and the tripod might give them a head start. They might have enough time to hide. They might have enough time to get away.

The open air is sharp on Rachel’s face. Suddenly they're outside, dashing across a field of gravel under a grey sky. They skid around a corner, around the edge of a cinderblock wall. For a second, all Rachel can hear is her own frantic breathing. Then she hears the footsteps. Horrible, crushing footsteps. She skitters away from the wall and turns around. She turns toward the noise just in time to see spindly metal legs clambering over the ruined building. A steepled metal hood peeks over the edge of the wall. Flickering light washes over Rachel’s face.

“ _Rachel, run!_ ”

She can't run. Something is holding her back. Something is wrapping around her waist and lifting her up. Now her feet are leaving the ground; she is weightless. Something is lifting her into the air, and all Rachel can see is the pale flickering light.

“ _Rachel!_ ”

This has happened before. Rachel doesn’t remember when, or how, but it has. She has stared into the eye of a tripod before. Her heart is racing, but she can’t feel it. The tripod is looking at her. She is looking at the tripod. They see each other.

The tripod bellows. The noise washes over Rachel, fills her ears, vibrates through every inch of her skin. She knows exactly where she’s heard _that_ before. Suddenly everything is real again. Rachel is dangling fifty feet in the air with a steel tentacle wrapped around her waist. A tripod is holding her up. Rachel screams.

She kicks and flails and beats against the metal tentacle holding her. Then the metal begins to moving, rearranging its hold on her, and Rachel catches sight of the ground. She’s so high up. If the tripod drops her, she’ll die. She stops struggling. The tripod lifts her a little higher, a little closer to its horrible hood, and she screams again. The tripod roars and Rachel’s screams become nothing but dull vibrations in her throat, drowned out by a flood of deafening _sound_.

By the time the sound fades, Rachel isn’t screaming anymore. Her throat stings a little. She feels the tripod adjusting its grip again. Her feet are still dangling, kicking against empty air. She doesn’t dare look down and see how high up she is. She can’t hear her father anymore. She doesn’t know where he is. She hopes he ran while he still had the chance.

The tripod roars again. Rachel flinches. She feels the metal coil slide around her and she grabs onto it in a sudden, frantic terror that the tripod is going to drop her. Instead it lifts her a little higher—a little closer to its eye—and roars again. Only this time the noise isn’t so deafening, and it doesn’t last as long. It cuts out abruptly and the tripod is quiet again. Rachel stares at it, trying to understand.

The tripod rumbles again. It’s a low, brassy noise that reverberates in Rachel’s chest. It stops for a moment, and then repeats. Then it stops—then it repeats. The pitch sounds higher this time.

The tripod is still holding Rachel up in the air. It probably should have dropped her by now, she thinks, in a sort of abstract blur. The tripod thunders again—three protracted tones. It starts low, drops lower, and then raises.

Rachel has never heard a tripod make noises like that.

The noises repeat. It sounds a little like a foghorn. And the tripod’s eye looks sort of like a lighthouse. The thought is strange—foreign and mundane all at once—like the alien metal wrapped around Rachel’s waist. It makes her laugh—the thought of a tripod standing at the edge of the harbor in Boston, speaking to the ships with its flickering light and its foghorn voice.

The tripod just stands there and watches Rachel laugh. Then it repeats the three tones again. Low, _lower_ , raised. Low, _lower_ , raised.

The pattern is familiar now. Rachel hums along with it. “Hmm _hmm!_ Hm.”

The tripod lifts her higher. Rachel yelps at the sudden motion. The tripod grips her tighter—just a little. Not enough to crush her. It makes a much softer foghorn noise, a single tone played very low.

“ _Hmmmmm_.” Rachel repeats it. “What does that mean?” She’s only whispering, but she has a feeling the tripod can hear everything she says.

The single tone repeats. _Hmmmmm._ Then, ever so slowly, the tripod begins to lower Rachel toward the ground.

It reminds Rachel just how _big_ the machine is. Her feet touch the ground again, and again the tripod towers over her. It only lasts a second, though. The tripod extends one leg and lowers its hood until it’s almost— _almost_ —at Rachel’s eye level.

The tripod makes its rumbling foghorn noise again. _Hmmmmm._ Then it repeats the three-tone pattern again. _Hmm-hmm! Hm._ Its searchlight casts grey shadows over the empty ruins.

Rachel stares at the tripod for a moment. She is very quiet and still, and the tripod is the same. None of this makes sense. Rachel takes a step away. Gravel crunches under her shoes. The tripod tilts its hood up a little, following her motion, but other than that it stays still. Rachel can still feel adrenaline racing under her skin, urging her to move.

“Stay here,” she says. She doesn’t know why. She takes another step back. The tripod twitches its hood up again, still watching her, but it _stays_. Rachel walks backward a few more steps, and then turns away. She looks back over her shoulder immediately. The tripod is still. Its searchlight seems to have dimmed.

Rachel starts walking. She needs to find her father. He’s nowhere in sight—he must have run when the tripod picked Rachel up. He can’t have gotten far. It hasn’t been that long since the tripod climbed over a building and picked her up—not long enough for Ray to cover any significant distance on foot, anyway. But there are so many places to hide in the wastes of Providence, and Rachel has no idea which direction he might have gone. Ray could be anywhere.

“Dad?” Rachel cups her hands around her mouth as she calls out. She keeps walking at an even pace. “Da-ad!”

Metal grinds and clatters behind her. Rachel startles and turns around to see the tripod levering itself up to almost its full height. She frowns. She faces forward away and walks a few more steps, and the same grinding noises follow. She looks back just in time to see the tripod sway forward, midway through walking.

“No,” Rachel says. She feels stupid as soon as she says it—she’s talking to a _tripod_ , an _alien fighting machine_ , in the middle of a dead city that it helped destroy. But the tripod is still watching her, and now it appears to be following her as well. “Stay here. I have to go.”

The tripod hesitates. Rachel keeps walking. She listens for the tripod’s steps, but this time it doesn’t follow her. When she looks back over her should the tripod is standing in the middle of the street. It still looks like it’s watching her. At least it isn’t following.

Once she's sure she won't be followed, Rachel starts to jog down the street. The city falls into eerie silence again. Rachel keeps her eyes open for any movement, any sign of life—any hint that she's not alone. _He can’t have gotten far,_ she thinks. _He’s hiding._ She can still see the terror on her father’s face. If she thinks about it she can still feel the fear in her own chest. _I should be dead,_ she thinks, but she doesn't feel the weight of it. Maybe she should be dead, but she isn't. So she has to keep moving.

“Da-ad!” Rachel is further down the street now, near an intersection marked by a cockeyed traffic light. She stops next to a half-collapsed building. Here the road splits into three branches, three possible paths—and that’s assuming Ray followed the road when he ran away. Assuming he ran this direction to begin with. _He couldn’t have gotten far,_ Rachel thinks, but she isn’t so sure anymore. She doesn’t know what to do if her dad did get away—if he’s too far away for her to reach, if the two of them have finally been separated not by war or disaster but by a weird set of circumstances and their own fear. “ _Dad!_ ”

Something sifts through the rubble on Rachel’s right side. She spins toward it. Her heart rate spikes with fear—for an instant she’s terrified that the tripod has come back, that it won’t be so merciful this time—but she doesn’t see anything. Nothing but another building with its windows blown out and half its bricks littering the sidewalks around it. A shadow flicks along the wall, inside the empty window frames, and then Rachel sees a human face peeking out. She knows that face.

“Dad!” She runs across the street. She leaps over the low edge of the empty window frame. She dashes across the field of broken glass and linoleum inside of the building.

“Rachel!”

Rachel runs to her father. He sweeps her up in his arms as soon as she gets there. He pulls her in against his chest. Rachel hugs him back. Her father rubs her back, presses a kiss to the top of her head. “Rachel,” he whispers. “Rachel. Thank you.” He isn’t talking to Rachel. He isn’t thanking her, at least. He pulls back after a minute, bracing his hands against her shoulders, and stares at her. “I’m so sorry,” he breathes. “I thought I lost you. I thought—” He cuts himself off. He looks away.

“I know,” Rachel says.

“What happened?” Ray says. He glances back over his shoulder. “How did you get away?”

“I—” Rachel looks sideways, following her dad’s eyeline. The street outside is empty and quiet. No sign of the tripod. She wonders if it’s still sitting there in the middle of the street, waiting for her to come back. “I don’t know.”

Ray frowns. “What?”

“The—the tripod—” Rachel can’t think of anything to say. She has no idea how to explain anything that just happened to her—least of all to her father. _You ran away,_ she thinks. She can’t blame him for it. Anyone would do the same. She would have, if she’d had the chance. But she didn’t, and the tripod picked her up, and yet she’s still alive. She’s still here. She’s speaking to her dad.

“What happened to it?” Ray says. “Is it dead? What did it do? Are you hurt?” He lifts his hands from Rachel’s shoulders, just an inch. His voice lowers to a soft, anxious tone. “What do you remember?”

For an moment, Rachel doubts herself. “I—I don’t—” The dangerous thing about memory loss is that it turns your brain against you; if Rachel _has_ forgotten something, something that happened with no other witnesses, she would have no idea. No one would ever be able to set the record straight.

She runs back through the events of the last hour. _Seeing the tripod—running from it—being picked up, hearing the foghorn, seeing it—_ She can’t find any gaps. “I remember,” she says, and leaves it at that. “I’m fine. It didn’t do anything to me.”

“So it’s dead,” Ray says.

“I don’t—think so.”

Ray goes very, very still. “We have to go,” he says.

“Wait,” Rachel says. She grabs her dad’s arm to keep him from turning away. “Wait, Dad, it’s—there’s something weird going on. You have to see it.”

“We have to _go_ ,” Ray says. “We can cut north from here.”

“Dad,” Rachel said.

“We have to warn people—if we find another convoy, we can work our way back to Boston, and—”

“Dad!” Rachel grips his arm. “It let me go.”

He stares at her. He squints. “What?”

“The tripod,” Rachel says. She has her father’s full attention. She has to make him understand. “It picked me up. It—it looked at me. And then it put me down.”

“It dropped you,” Ray says, and his hands go to hover over her shoulders again.

“No,” Rachel says, “it _put me down_. It—I think it talked to me!”

Ray frowns. A deep furrow forms between his eyebrows, and he tilts his head sideways. He’s trying to comprehend it—Rachel can see the wheels turning, can see him trying to process all the words she’s just thrown at him.

“Rachel,” he says. The soft, worried tone is back. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine!” He doesn’t believe her. He isn’t going to believe anything she says. “The tripod, it’s—there’s something weird about it. It was looking at me. It didn’t—” Rachel trails off. Ray is just staring at her as she talks. He’s not listening, or if he is, he doesn’t believe her. Rachel hardly believes herself. The story sounds insane as she thinks about it again. Her father is never going to believe her unless he sees it for herself. “I have to show you,” Rachel says. She takes a step back. The worry on Ray’s face shifts into something more dire. “You have to come with me.”

“Rachel—” He reaches for her. Rachel ducks away and makes a break for the empty window frame she came in by. “Rachel!” She hears her dad following her. She picks up the pace, jumps the low window sill, and runs out into the street. “Rachel, get back here!”

The road Rachel followed to get here curves gently as it runs. Rachel can’t see the tripod from where she stands in the intersection. She keeps on running, back the way she came, following the road until she catches a glimpse of a glowing metal figure in the middle of the road further down. Then something grabs her shoulder and yanks her back.

“Dad, stop it!” Rachel struggles, though she knows it’s pointless. Her father is three inches taller than her and much stronger, and he’s trying to keep her safe.

“I can’t let you go,” Ray says.

“Dad—”

“No!” He shakes her as he says it. He startles her. “I can’t let you go. Not this time. Not again.”

There’s something in his voice. Something dark and desperate that Rachel can’t place, something she can’t remember hearing before. It scares her. She goes still in his grip. “Dad?” His eyes are a little unfocused. He’s looking at Rachel but he isn’t seeing her. Rachel can hear herself breathing. “Dad,” she says. She murmurs it. “ _Dad_.”

His eyes clear. The moment passes. Rachel makes a break, tries to run, but she isn’t quick enough. Ray pulls her back. “We’re leaving,” he says. His voice is still low—dangerous.

“Dad, wait,” Rachel says. “Just wait—”

A foghorn roars. The noise tears across the street, echoing off of buildings, freezing everything in its tracks. It’s not a foghorn, Rachel knows. It’s the tripod.

Ray ducks like he’s trying to hide from the noise. Rachel follows the motion out of habit. When she looks up again she sees the tripod rising above the buildings down the street. It strides toward them. A strange cocktail of fear and exhilaration mixes in Rachel’s chest.

The tripod halts halfway down the street and roars again. This time the noise isn’t so loud. This time Rachel doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t run, either. She spreads her feet. If she stays, if she stands her ground, maybe her father will understand.

The tripod bellows again. Rachel feels her dad flinch away from it. A moment later he runs. He tries to drag her with him, but this time she's ready. She braces against the movement, and they break apart, right there in the street.

“Rachel!” Ray sounds scared, and tired, and just plain exasperated. Rachel doesn’t listen. She stands in the middle of the street, watching the tripod draw closer, and as it bears down on her, she has a flash of sudden fear.

“Wait—!” She flings her hand out—as if that would do anything to help her—and then the tripod draws to a grinding halt. It stands twenty feet away from Rachel, barely any distance at all for a tripod, and stares at her.

The air at Rachel’s shoulder is cold and empty. Her dad isn’t there anymore. When Rachel looks over she sees him standing a few feet away, in the shadow of a building, staring at the tripod. “What the hell?” he whispers.

Rachel steps forward. The tripod hums and rears back on its back two legs. Its front leg lands a few feet closer to Rachel and its hood lowers, like it’s looking down at her. On impulse, Rachel swings her hand so she’s reaching for the great metal hood. She spreads her fingers. “Hi,” she says. Her voice is quiet and shaky. She makes an effort to speak louder. “I don’t know if you know what I’m saying, but—can you do what you did again? The noises?” Rachel calls up the memory. “Hmm _hmm!_ Hm.” She puts as much volume into the noises as she can. “Like that?”

The tripod stares at her. For a second Rachel is scared that it didn’t hear her, or didn’t understand. Then the hood lifts, and the tripod repeats the pattern on an infinitely grander scale. _Hmm-hmm! Hmmmmmmm._

“That’s it,” Rachel says. She can’t help smiling. “Hmm- _hmm!_ Hm.” The tripod repeats it again, too, for good measure.

Rachel looks back over her shoulder. Her dad is still there. He stares at her, his face blank. He sees her looking back at him and glances up at the tripod.

“See?” Rachel says. She doesn’t know what else to say.

Ray takes a halting step toward her. Then another. His gaze flicks back and forth between her and the tripod. He closes the gap between them.

“It’s not… dangerous,” Rachel says, though she still doesn’t know for sure if that is true. Ray draws closer to her, so he’s standing at her side again. The movement brings him closer to the tripod, and he flinches away a little as it turns its eye on him.

“Rachel,” he says. He puts a hand on her shoulder. “I need you to tell me what happened between you. And... the tripod. Tell me again. Slower.”

So Rachel does.


End file.
